Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

Cell Head Ferlighan Davies was the next to arrive, followed by their scrawny acne-faced tech-specialist Nicholas Shallow bearing a large clam-shell briefcase, and then the rest came streaming into the white-lighted underground space in clumps of fours and fives.

Hanna watched Nicholas set his briefcase down onto the main table and unclasp it and retrieve from within a bulky object—a jammer—that was spiked with antennae on its top surface like a durian. This, he raised to the light for a cursory inspection and, finding nothing amiss, placed flat-side down upon the table's matte-beige surface. Hanna watched attentively as his long and slender fingers danced across the jammer's gunmetal surface—as he felt around its lumpy, ovoid base and edged up the porcupine juts its myriad antennae made—and she shivered slightly to imagine his fingers touch her skin, to caress her as he caressed that device in such an oddly sensuous manner.

She pinched her herself in the thigh and looked away.

When she returned her attention to Nicholas, he was engaged in fitting into the jammer's base a thick, insulated cable which snaked across the floor and connected at the other end to a computer-terminal set upon an adjacent table. His task done, he shuffled away to take his place before a terminal screen and started clacking away frenetically at the keyboard.

The others who were streaming in found their seats at the main table and settled themselves almost immediately into tense and whispered conversations with their fellow Antijims.

"Did you see the fireworks?"

"Yeah, I heard the bang… where was it?"

"Next to Government House—"

"It was the Diplomatic Chambers. The Jigs were all over Voxcast, blaming the Gimmarash. But you know what? I'm not so sure anymore…"

"—Ahman, amazing how you could miss the massive burning phallus lighting up the entire street—"

"Fuck offa my back widat, I hadta deal with the wife!"

And Hanna turned to observe them as they susurrated amongst themselves, finding their faces hung with fearful, uncertain expressions. "City's goin' kakking crazy!"—was the gist of how they were reacting. Not many of them seemed to buy the official narrative, as promulgated by Saltilla Home Affairs, that the Diplomatic Chambers incident could merely be described as 'an uptick in insurgent activity'.

"I was just scrolling commicube earlier; they're saying it's some kind of Jig sabotage," Hanna offered, raising her head and flaring her nostrils delicately.

The air turned awkward at her sudden and cumbrous attempt to join the conversation.

The others turned to regard her, their faces set into masks of rigid apathy. It was clear that her input was not welcome.

"Dat so?" Vernon Brown replied finally, the snark in his tone grating harshly upon her sensibilities. "Or maybe, do you think the Slavs are having anything to do widit?"

Chortles all round. Laughter.

Hanna Truganev's cheeks burned at the snide, thinly-veiled remark, and she lowered her head out of reflex. Vernon's distaste for those who bore surnames like hers was common enough to be tiresome. It was common enough also for her fellow citizens to harbor a racist suspicion of her loyalties, but that didn't make it any less difficult to ignore. And, of course, the fact that she was a woman made things even harder.

"Vern, that was uncalled for," Ferlighan snapped. Hanna forced her head up, recalling her own resolution not to show weakness in front of men like Vernon. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, Nicholas glancing over from his work, and her cheeks burned hotter to wonder if she'd maybe embarrassed herself in front of him. He looked uncomfortable—sweaty, despite the air-conditioning—but all he did was grimace strangely and return his full attention to the terminal screen, and Hanna's heart sank to think of his indifference.

"Uhuh, I kno' you got a thing for Slav chicks, Ferli, making her your secretary for who knows what," Vernon snorted, unchastised. "Ye best be careful she don't shank you in your buttocks after you've had 'er."

"She is the Vice-Head of this Cell. You and everyone here will accord her the proper respect," Ferlighan stressed, narrowing his eyes and shaking his face so that his jowls jiggled for emphasis.

"C'mon Ferli—"

"One more word outta your dirty mouth and I'm goin' straight to Home Affairs," Ferli seethed, jabbing his index finger at Vernon's beady-eyed scowl.

"Jeezo, man, he goin' full retard…" someone whispered loudly. Chuckles.

Vernon did not reply Ferli's threat, receding instead into a sullen, slitty-eyed silence.

Conversation restarted. The awkward silence passed. Hanna placed her palms on her thighs and straightened her back, but otherwise avoided making any further comment.

The last few members arrived within twenty-seven minutes from the promulgation of the muster alert by Saltilla Home Affairs. An acceptable performance, Ferlighan commented, clapping his hands to get the attention of everyone assembled, the soft puck-puck of his fleshly palms sounding very soft in that capacious place.

"Now that we're all here," Ferlighan cleared his throat, "I'd like to thank you all on behalf of the City, for your contributions."

"You gonna pay us more or what?" a tonsured man hollered at him. "I've got morning shift tomorrow!"

The crowd murmured amongst themselves.

"Relax, Jerry. Tonight's operation is claimable as an off-day. You'll have an official excuse from work tomorrow—just have to submit the muster document to your boss. It should be in your, uh, transceiver inbox. And talking about pay—yes, Home Affairs has agreed to pay one point five times the normal rate. Did I mention we got risk pay as well? That's in addition."

Cheers and hoots. Jerry was nodding to himself, satisfied.

"So, I'll keep the route-briefing short. We'll need minimum thirty minutes of JIT with our new weapons," Ferli said, indicating the half-story cupboard doubling as their weapons-stash, his expression a mixture of pride and emphasis, "which they've allocated to us, as you can see—and we should be out of here no later than zero-five-hundred hours. Keep everything clean. We go out, do what we have to be doing and fuck off for the day. As usual, we've been assigned Prilogia—"

"Holy anal-ripping hell, there again!" an older woman—whom Hanna recognized as Natalie Grosner—interrupted. "Ye cun't be getting another assignment?"

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The other Antijims groused in agreement, and a few shared pregnant, baggy-eyed glances and muttered the obligatory "chunt's right".

"It's going to be dangerous out there, Ferli, after what happened," a prominent-nosed man, George Osher, offered bluntly. "Maybe we can cut it a li'l shorter and take the outside road instead—"

"Do you not see the firepower we're packin'? Suck it up, man!" Ferlighan returned irritably. "In any case—"

The lights went out, plunging the surroundings into pitch-black darkness. A loud sound, like some colossal mechanism shifting within the walls, reverberated through that large space. Shouts and hollers. Hanna's hand shot reflexively to her waist-pouch, her heart leaping into her throat as she felt for her Incunabulum to check that it was still there.

Indeed it was. Half of her relief came from realizing there wasn't any dark-skin around to steal it, though she felt stupid for even thinking the thought.

"What the fuck is up with this, Hanna?" a voice called out, irate. It was Vernon. She'd recognise his voice anywhere.

"It wasn't me!" she squeaked, her anxiety tuning the pitch of her voice a full step higher. It wasn't her fault the damn city couldn't—

"Hey, calm down!" Hanna heard Ferlighan call out, and then a torchlight beam sliced out into the pitch-black darkness. The others were jabbering anxiously to each other and stumbling over themselves.

"Calm down!" he shouted again, louder, swinging the torch across the faces of several of the Antijims and causing them to cringe reflexively.

"Stop that—"

"—Shit, Ferli—"

"It's probably a power trip. I'll… go upstairs to check… give me five," someone sounded, and Hanna knew it was Nicholas who'd said it because she knew his voice well.

"Whozzat?" Ferli questioned, slicing his torch-beam in the direction of the voice and, in the process, eliciting strings of curses from those whom he momentarily blinded.

"It's Nick. I said I'll go upstairs to check," Nicholas reiterated, and Hanna thought that his voice was trembling unnaturally. Another beam of light materialized in the darkness. Nicholas had managed to find his torch. Hanna bit her lip, thinking if she should offer to go along with him.

But the opportunity was lost before she could act upon it. Without waiting for Ferlighan's reply, Nicholas moved quickly through the darkened space, ranging toward the threshold and disappearing up the stairwell.

More light-beams blinked into existence. The space was criss-crossed by silver cones shining differently-shaped ellipses onto the faraway ceiling and making of every face cliffs of yawning shadow.

Ferlighan had managed to calm the others and was preparing to continue with his route-briefing. He clapped his hands again and directed everyone's attention to himself, and then he turned to stare at a blank terminal-screen and joked that maybe the Gimma Ashby had gone after the electrical grid—which was ridiculous because all the Gimma Ashby were comprised of were violent regressives with low IQ levels and who, if left to their own devices, would turn every hole they infested into the Nook.

The tension ebbed. Hanna found her own torch and turned it on and let the simmering anxieties slough off her skin. She couldn't help but reflect on how wild her emotional swings had lately been—they went up and down like the stock market, and maybe this was a sign that she should start herself on some benzodiazepines, as her doctor was recommending.

"... We'll avoid the eastern section today. Home Affairs assigned a total of fifteen Cells to patrol Prilogia, so I think we can get away by just—"

The faint whine of servos flexing drifted over from a dark corner, crescendoing and then peaking as a tortured hum; Hanna's head snapped upwards just in time to see a dark figure scuttling hyperfast across the ceiling like a horrifyingly large and agile spider. She yelled and pushed to her feet, losing her balance and tumbling over backwards onto her rump. A crash that sounded like crumpling plastic. The beams of light were jerked in messy, haphazard directions. Then, another noise.

Something wet and raw.

When the violence started, it threw the surroundings into a sudden and savage pandemonium. Screams, yells, any sound at all that the larynx could create.

Hanna swung her torch round, catching blood, pieces of meat, organs and bone being thrown up into the air. The beam caught and bounced off of a ghoulish figure covered in gore and gobbets of twitching flesh. It was darting about with preternatural speed, its long limbs whipping wide and lethal arcs that rent apart the air and left gaping, mortal wounds in the bodies of her fellows. The creature had dropped from somewhere above them, flattening the table beneath its weight and crushing the Antijims' legs into paste. Hanna had only been spared because of her inadvertent backward tumble. It stood now at the center of the ruined table, juddering savagely as it eviscerated those that were still alive and screaming.

A shriek tore itself from her throat.

The thing halted and turned toward her, Vernon's severed half-head clutched in its skeletal, ten-figured carpal mechanism. Its opposable phalanges had been jammed into Vernon's brain from three directions at once, causing his dead eyes to twitch within their sockets and his tongue to flop about in macabre contortions.

The creature was massive, and even though it was hunched it towered perhaps twice Hanna's height. The mechanical monstrosity was drenched in blood, but beneath that curtain of crimson Hanna could discern sleek and metallic surfaces. The thing's limbs were lithe, many-jointed appendages that rotated odd angles through space; its face was a red-streaked skull—too smooth, too glossy, too geometric to be organic.

Oh but its eyes had focused on her, dark-pupiled and evidently human.

Kurubim.

Hanna was already running, losing her torch and tearing down toward the stores of water, gibbering madly and trying to keep herself from vomiting. A soundscape of screams and tearing flesh pursued her, even as she lunged behind a pallet stacked high with dried corn. Ensconced in darkness, she curled up in a fetal position and then quailed soundlessly, clutching her Incunabulum to her heart and praying, praying to Ahman for deliverance.

A smattering of gunfire rattled in the distance. More yells. Then silence.

The silence persisted for many moments. Hanna's blood ran cold.

She strained her ears, trying to parse the silence, trying to hear if the creature was still there.

"Is anyone alive?"

It was Ferli. He was breathing hard. But it was definitely him. Hanna let go of a breath she didn't know she had held, but her heart still felt like it was exploding.

"Anyone? I managed to kill it!"

It was definitely Ferli. But something in the way he had delivered his lines…

"I'm here," Hanna squeaked softly, crawling out from her hiding spot. Her pants felt wet between her thighs, and she realized that she had peed herself.

"A pleasure to meet you."

She whipped around. A patch of red light had encapsulated her form, shone from a blacksteel clavicle not two meters away. Hanna could just make out the contours of a featureless mask that seemed to melt away at its edges into darkness.

Wretched sounds were loosed from her throat. She raised her hand, pouring every ounce of willpower she could muster into activating her Etching; her Incunabulum pulsed, and a pungent smell assailed her nostrils. The tips of her fingers started disintegrating, sublimating into a colorless gas that suffused the space.

"Oh?" it said in Ferli's voice. "Methane."

With a flare of her intentionality, the frontage erupted into brilliant orange fire that sputtered, then flared out into an explosion that roasted her hand through and singed her face and burnt off the tips of her hair.

Hanna breathed, her throat ragged from the heat.

"Living things must struggle, as is the natural order," the thing intoned, its voice made of metal, rock and gloom. It stepped forward through the billowing smog and crunched the yellow embers underfoot, its chassis barely scratched, and its organic eyes were dark and depthless pools by the wan red light beamed from its shoulder. Hanna gibbered madly, thinking of her grandmother, praying to Ahman.

"A minor inconvenience."

It moved, faster than she could track. The last thing she felt before nothingness consumed her was pain—a pain in her head, increasing and then multiplying and then usurping her consciousness, and as her vision went out she felt her brain splay up out of her skull and into the cold environment.